And I just can't bear to talk about the buses anymore. Apparently, Nagin is now claiming that school and city buses just weren't good enough -- he was waiting for Greyhounds from all over the country to converge on NOLA and save his people. It was more important for his residents to be saved in "style" than to be saved at all, apparently.
This man is just beneath contempt -- and has no ability to do any commonsense reasoning about logistics whatsoever. For instance, even if Greyhound dumped all its current passengers out on the side of the road wherever they were (unprecedented and crazy in and of itself) and headed straight for NOLA, how long would it have taken them to get there from hundreds if not a thousand or more miles away? Simple division will tell you this is just simply nuts on first glance.
This is why first responders have to be local: moving great quantities of ANYTHING over large distances may take much more time than you have in an emergency.
Now I will give you that the first responders in NOLA were themselves casualties as well as their families. But they wouldn't have been if they had planned to get everyone including their own families OUT OF THERE.
But now Thomas Lipscomb brings us some fresh perspective with "The Machine Stops". Now we can understand why there was no evacuation to start with -- as well as why it hasn't happened yet and reports of shooting at relief workers continue:
More reinforcement for the "NOLA is two cities" concept: one a "Europe-like" tourist destination and the other fetid terrorist gang-land in the swamp. Apparently, the best course of action is to let these terrorist thugs die of disease in filthy squalor due to their complete inability to operate as rational beings. I guess I can't argue too much with that.Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans
which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members
deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.
But did so many others have to die for this small piece of justice?
Posts
